Intensive care units have been called "hazardous to health" and existing evidence suggests that sleep deprivation is a serious problem in the intensive care unit (ICU). Recent evidence suggests that sleep deprivation may have adverse effects on respiratory muscle function, respiratory center sensitivity to carbon dioxide, inspiratory muscle endurance, and maximum voluntary ventilation, potentially contributing to delayed weaning from mechanical ventilation. The impact of sleep promoting interventions in critically ill patients has never been tested, in spite of urgent pleas for such research in the literature. In order to lay the groundwork for future large scale clinical trials, we intend to do a pilot clinical trial to measure the impact of relatively simple noise reduction and other sleep promoting interventions on the quality and quantity of sleep. In addition, preliminary exploration of the impact of these interventions on important intermediate and ultimate outcomes (length of time on mechanical ventilation, intensive care unit length of stay) in critically ill subjects is also planned. SPECIFIC AIMS: 1. Measure sleep patterns with neither the noise reduction intervention (NRI) or sleep promoting measures (SPM) (CONTROL) with SPM only, and with NRI+SPM in critically ill subjects in the ICU setting. 2. Find the smallest subset of potentially important covariates that may affect the measurement of sleep outcomes (e.g. medications, number of interruptions) with CONTROL, SPM only, and with NRI+SPM. 3. Examine the significance of differences in sleep outcome measures in preparation for designing an efficient (powerful) test of alternative treatment conditions in critically ill subjects. 4. Compare the length of time on mechanical ventilation in critically ill subject with age-, illness-severity- and sex-matched subjects who have received NRI and SPM and have not received NRI and SPM. 5. Compare ICU length of stay (LOS) in critically ill subject with age-, illness-severity- and sex matched subjects who have received NRI and SPM and have not received NRI and SPM.